This is hilarious. Every single Google conspiracy is basically because some Google Engineer tried to DRY up functionality in an insanely complicated system.
So, I think that's probably quite right in general, and it's no "conspiracy". But it can still be a barrier to privacy. Rather than a conspiracy, it's evidence of priorities. You don't eliminate a development affordance when DRYing something up for something you know is a priority -- or if you do, it'll get refactored to fix it soon enough, if it is a priority.
Which is perhaps generally applicable to "conspiracies" in fact. There are some instances of powerful people making plans; but there are even more instances of results from systemic rewards and punishments, people acting independently with certain interests, from just how the system works. It doesn't make em always great. Systems can be changed.
How can you explain this: in Android 5.1, every time you enable GPS, a popup appears asking you to share location with Google. There is a checkbox titled "Don't show again", but if you tick it, the button "Decline" gets disabled [1].
I don't have the exact screenshot, but the popup looks approximately like this [2].
They intentionally wrote the code to make sure that the user doesn't make the wrong choice. And this popup is not really necessary for the user, mostly for Google.
Also, this reminds me of Google's "Amateur Hour" story with Firefox. Every time they make a mistake, it's in the favour of Google, what a coincidence.
It's funny, though, how every single "conspiracy" just randomly ends up falling in the "fine if you give them full access, fails if you turn off location services" quadrant. Like, I've not once seen a mistake in the direction of "eh just turn off that data collection point and it'll fix it."
Imagine you have ~billions of users and 99.9% of them use the default. Do you put your eng effort towards power-user flexibility for the tinfoil hat crowd or do you improve popular features?
In the case mentioned, searching "your locations" appears to be just all on or all off (I have no insider knowledge of Maps). That greatly reduces the surface area for heisenbugs in a high QPS system.
The reason for that is pretty obvious isn't it? Very few systems depend on an absence of data to work. However, many systems can be designed which depend on the presence of data. If a setting affects the presence of data in some Google-internal databases, turning that setting off will disable any features that depend on the presence of that data in that database.
Unless they demonstrate a conscious, consistent effort to be privacy aware and let you control you data, the way Apple does, for example, those conspiracies will keep coming.
The only way out for Google is to actually start paying attention to that issue and make a conscious effort. And it'll take time before they'll regain the trust.
